


Reddish

by noxic



Series: Sketchy Girls and Lipstick Boys [1]
Category: Powerpuff Girls
Genre: Angst, Exploring gender expression through the eyes of a superpowered teen delinquent, Gen, Nonbinary Character, Queer Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 10:30:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15337953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noxic/pseuds/noxic
Summary: Brick just wanted to see what his mouth looked like painted red. That was all.





	Reddish

Chef Boyardee Ravioli. Cold, straight from the can. With a plastic spoon.  
  
That was the last meal that Brick had eaten. The breakfast of champions, he’d said around the cold slime of cheap tomato sauce. It was 3 a.m., and he followed it with a lukewarm glass of the metallic-tasting water that dripped out of the tap in the shitty apartment he shared with his brothers. He’d left the can sitting on the counter, the spoon unwashed, and the glass in the sink where he knew it would sit until the next time one of them got antsy enough to try tidying up around the place.

The life of a professional supervillain fucking _sucked_.

He supposed he had Mojo Jojo to thank for that. The useless ape had been out of contact just short of two weeks, and communication before that had been spotty at best. There had been a lot of “stay put and wait for the call” and “try to lay low while I figure something out” intermixed occasionally with a hopeful sounding “I think I’ve got a lead for you boys” that always ended up falling short.

It had been more than two months since the Rowdyruff Boys had been in _any_ sort of business--not even the kind that resulted in underground enemies and shady market deals that the Powerpuffs wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. They hadn’t been doing _shit_ for _weeks_.

Instead, they’d been rotting away in what Brick could only assume was the cheapest apartment block in Citysville, watching daytime TV day-in and day-out and eating shit out of cans that Brick was sure would make them all sick if they weren’t artificially created superhumans drawing energy from a mysterious and volatile chemical.

Brick was no stranger to Chef Boyardee. The two of them had become fast friends over the last twelve years of Brick’s existence in the material world. He _trusted_ Chef Boyardee. The scrape of a spoon against the ridged inside of the can while he tried to collect the leftover sauce was so familiar that he practically considered it a comfort. The film that the greasy sauce left on his tongue that he had to swallow down with water was like ritual fodder. He _lived_ for the way he had to open his jaw just a little wider when two pieces of ravioli got stuck together and couldn’t be pried apart.

You could even say Brick _loved_ Chef Boyardee.

 _But Chef Boyardee was fucking disgusting_.

Brick didn’t need a refined palate to know that the only reason he and his brothers ate the stuff was because it was easy, cheap, and required practically no cleanup. “Cheap” was the ultimate deciding factor.

The life of a professional supervillain was _not_ as glamorous as it should have been. Fucking Mojo Jojo.

You might wonder why all of this is important. Who gives a shit about seventeen year old Brick standing in a linoleum-lined kitchen with a can of shitty ravioli? Nobody. The point here is that Brick knew what it was like to have next to nothing. He and his brothers lived that reality _every single day_. They rarely had enough food in their pantry after Mojo sent their allowances, they didn’t have cable, and they slept on cots in the living room, taking turns indulging in the privacy of the apartment’s mostly unfurnished single bedroom.

And so, being intimately familiar with the brutal reality of wanting, but not _having,_ combined with the fact that Brick was _literally a superpowered criminal_ , he was no stranger to theft. Shoplifting, burglary, the works. He’d seen it all, done most of it himself.

Stealing was just...so _easy_ . It was so easy compared to fighting or spying or any of the other random bullshit Mojo liked to assign them. Usually, it was just a matter of not being conspicuous, then not getting caught (ha--on his best days, he could approach the speed of _light_ ; he certainly wasn’t worried about mall cops).

It was usually such a simple task. So why couldn’t he do it now?

Brick stood in front of the makeup counter at one of the big department stores that comprised Citysville Mall. His eyes were locked on a short black tube sitting delicately on a rack with a dozen others just like it. Lipstick.

It was damn expensive, like he knew it would be. Even the cheapest tubes were worth at least ten dollars that he didn’t have in his empty pockets.

It should be easy enough to reach out, pretend to examine the tube, then dart off while no one was looking. So why did it feel so fucking impossible?

He knew why.

Brick shoved his hands into his pockets, feeling his fingers brush against the seventeen cents he’d picked up on the street and the quarter he’d pulled out of a vending machine change slot. Goddamn, he hated being poor. Maybe if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have to think so hard about why this stupid, girly shit was so important that he had to have it, even without paying for it. If he had money, he could just call it an impulse buy, and maybe write it off as graffiti material.

But this was different. He didn’t have to do this, and really _shouldn’t_ for the sake of laying low.

_So why did he really, really want to?_

Brick’s eyes darted back and forth across the area he stood in, checking for the sixth time in two minutes that the coast was clear before reaching out to pick up one of the little black tubes whose sticker advertised a reddish color that almost matched his jacket.

He stared down at it for just a few seconds that felt entirely too long. He felt warmth pool in his stomach, in his chest, in his face. His fingers tightened around the tube to stop them from shaking.

And then a woman stepped into eyeshot with a toddler in her shopping basket, and Brick shoved the lipstick up his sleeve in a panic before hurrying away. He still shook just a little, and he probably looked suspicious as fuck, but he couldn’t bring himself to do anything about it.

He exited the mall at a half-run before launching himself into the air in a streak of red light. He was a mile away from the mall in seconds.

 

 

Brick ended up on a rooftop in downtown Citysville holding a broken side-view mirror he’d seen in a dumpster on his way over the city. It was cracked in 3 places, but that wasn’t important. He propped it up against the raised edge around the roof and leaned in as close as he could get until only his mouth and chin were visible in the reflection.

He had the tube of lipstick about an inch away from his face when the reality of the situation came crashing down around him. He was a Rowdyruff. A Rowdyruff _Boy._ He was the oldest, the leader. He was supposed to be setting an example for his brothers.

He was definitely not supposed to be doing _this._

The hand holding the lipstick shook, and he felt turmoil bubble in his gut, boiling him from the inside out. With a tremor, he sat up straighter and tried to see his whole reflection in the shitty, cracked, salvaged mirror.

His face was angular and hard, his cheeks gaunt in a way that had had to admit was from hunger. His orange hair fell out from underneath his red baseball cap messily, framing his face on one side while the rest stayed tucked shoddily behind his ear. He had red eyes.

He had eyelashes. _L_ _ong_ eyelashes. And soft eyes. And a mouth that he couldn’t stop picturing coated in red.

He touched the lipstick to his lower lip.

In the end, putting it on was harder than he expected, and he had to wipe it off several times before getting it even remotely right. But once he’d finished, his mouth looked soft and reddish and—

—pretty.

Brick’s brain short circuited, and that word played over and over again like an iPod stuck on repeat. Pretty. _Pretty._

_Girly?_

No. Just... _pretty_.

And somehow, it didn’t feel like a bad thing.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm nonbinary and i'll take nb!brick with me to my fucking grave so don't @ me
> 
> file this under self indulgence! turns out, you can just write whatever you want and no one will stop you! wild!
> 
> also--sorry if there are typos/errors but i'm posting this at 4:20am so i don't really care


End file.
